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“With all due respect, cliched Republican dissenter….” October 19, 2005 at 10:42 pm

[ Viewing: “Star Trek Deep Space Nine – The Complete Seventh Season” (Avery Brooks) ]

“… but the economy isn’t going to matter, the day after… tomorrow.”

Man, that was definitely the best episode of South Park since the “Die, Hippie, Die” episode. My sides still hurt I was laughing so hard. The scary thing is, there are plenty of people that won’t get a lot of the jokes about the over-reactions concerning global warming, something that isn’t even proven or at least proven to the point that changing our habits will help drop temperatures enough to make it worth while.

Update: I guess I should clarify what I said above before someone goes nuts and says I’m denying facts or something. I don’t mean to deny that there is a measured increase in the temperature, that much is fact. I’m saying that I don’t believe that there is any real proof that it is attributable to human activity, or even mostly attributable. I don’t deny that human activity could be (and probably is) adding to global warming (via CO2 output, pollution, etc) but I think that the effect we have is likely very minimal. There are too many other factors, like the recent increased output of heat from the sun and the fact that the earth has natural cycles of warming and cooling to try and blame it all on human activities. Especially since so many people that claim to want to stop global warming seem to think the way to do that is to basically hobble the economy of the US (and some other western countries), while giving countries like China and India a complete pass (read the Kyoto protocols sometime). There’s just too much we don’t know, and nowhere near enough indisputable proof supporting human-caused global warming to warrant massive changes in how we live.

Another nerd test… August 6, 2005 at 11:09 am

Damn.. Wee just barely outscored me.

I am nerdier than 94% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

Still pretty impressive though, and completely honest. 🙂

More testing fun.. July 30, 2005 at 12:57 am

[ Viewing: “South Park – The Complete First Five Seasons” () ]

So after the geek test below.. I played around on the same site and got the following results.

W00t:

I am 9% Idiot.
Friggin Genius

I am not annoying at all. In fact most people come to me for advice. Of course they annoy the hell out of me. But what can I do? I am smarter than most people.

I am, of course.. a frggin’ genius.. 🙂

(more…)

Upgrades sometimes suck.. July 17, 2005 at 3:34 am

[ Viewing: “The Day After Tomorrow (Widescreen Edition)” (Roland Emmerich) ]

Well, it took basically the whole day, and well into the night (as the posting time for this entry shows) but I finally got my server updated. I bought the new server months ago, but kept putting off the swapout again and again. Finally did it today though, since I’m starting a couple week’s vacation.

So now, I’m running a dual Opteron 250, 2Gig, 4x200Gig SATA disks (in a HW RAID-10 config with a 3ware Escalade card). W00t..

Of course.. I’m running 64bit. 😀

Gah… I really hate doing windows… June 19, 2005 at 10:48 am

If you have an amd64 based system like I do, and wanted to test out the Windows XP x64 edition, but also realize that it might be a good idea to have the 32bit XP installed too, learn from my mistake. You can dual boot them just fine… _but_ you *have to install x64 AFTER 32bit XP*.
Imaging my surprise when I went to boot back into x64 after installing XP on my 2nd HDD only to be greeted with a “Unable to load %windows%/system32/ntoskrnl.exe file, please replace file” or something similar.

Searching the web and even MS’s knowledge base (which pathetically doesn’t even have the x64 edition listed as a product to search yet… lovely) left me trying my own stuff. Turns out the only fix was to do a repair install. For those that don’t know, that’s not the repair console.. you boot off the cd and go through the steps to install windows, but after you choose the partition that already has x64 on it, it’ll say it sees it. It’ll then ask you to hit R to do the “repair install” or to hit return to do a fresh one. The repair install seems to load the default data off the cd again, but the good news is that you don’t lose anything. Thankfully when I finally booted x64 again, it was just like I left it. Though that damn repair install took a good 1/2 hour, not to mention the 2 hours I spent searching the net and trying things in the repair console like the bootcfg command.

My educated guess is that the bootloader loaded by 32bit XP couldn’t bootstrap into 64bit mode for the x64 kernel.. whereas the x64 one can, and can drop back into 32bit mode when loading normal XP. It makes logical sense once I realized that’s what the problem was.. but I find it frustrating that there’s no info on that on the MS site (at least that any searching I did could find) and that it took such a long run to fix it for the fix that worked. It’s especially frustrating that there’s no data on MS’ site when my searches showed that I’m nowhere near the only person that’s run into this problem either.

Oh yeah.. not to mention that I couldn’t even install x64 origianlly without disabling my onboard sata controller (even though I was installing on PATA disks).. another thing I figured out on my own. If I didn’t disable it, the first boot into the setup program (after booting from CD and watching it copy files to the hdd) would just hang. Pathetic for a brand new windows release.

*sigh* lesson learned I guess…

Why you dirty mother#@(<*%s May 16, 2005 at 10:11 pm

So email spam is bad enough, spamassasin blocks a lot, but damn they still get through. Then I had to deal with comment spam.. which got bad enough that I require typekey registration to comment now.. and that spam is gone. Now, it’s referrer spam.

For those that don’t know, apache (the web server software I use) can log the referrer, or web site that linked to mine. It’s interesting to see the stats of who linked to me, and to follow those links and find out why or who they are. You can see the ones that refer to my site the most in my [stats http://www.miguelito.org/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.miguelito.org page]. But lately there’s been a lot of referrer spam… to porn sites, and mostly.. online casinos and poker sites. I implemented a blacklist plugin for awstats (the stats package I use) which works pretty well.. but they kept getting through so now I block all URLs with any of the words: poker, casino, roulette, etc..

So today I look at the referrers that top my list and #1 is www.ua-princeton.com… and guess what? That bastard is an online casino site too.

Guess I’m going to have to implement my own plugin to not only check a url against the blacklist, but to look at the webpage and if it’s got too many keywords like poker, casino, etc.. then boot it.

Damn these little buggers are quick… May 12, 2005 at 4:45 pm

So I signed up and started using the new groups.google.com interface for reading usenet periodically, and made my first post a couple days ago. I always use new email aliases on my domain for each site I sign up for, so that I know where spammers got my email from.

In less then 48 hours from my first post (in an sdnet.* group no less) I started getting spams to the alias I use there. And a couple were the phishing scams that pretend to be from paypal/ebay/banks/etc to trick you into entering your login data at a spoofed url.

Sheesh.. these spammers are fast, and annoying as hell.

Nice doggie… cute little pooch. April 13, 2005 at 1:42 pm

Seems that ol’ Rachel’s been inside my head again. She has written basically exactly how I feel about cats, and why I like dogs better. The only difference I would note with my dog compared to her’s are that, due to being 1/2 lab, human contact means everything to my dog. While Rachel’s dogs might just ignore her, my dog goes friggin’ nuts when I get home.

BTW, for those that think I actually hate cats.. first, read Rachel’s post, then realize that I don’t hate them, I just don’t understand why people would want one as a pet. Rest assured that you can invite me to your house, and if you have cats, I won’t drop-kick your cat, or do anything else mean to it.

However, now we have this interesting issue in the news about allowing hunting of wild cats in Wisconsin. What gets me about this whole issue is the amount of people that are going nuts fighting against this. Perhaps if those people had gotten off their asses, and applied even a tiny percentage of the energy they’re expending now, to helping control the cat population before it got out of hand, then there would be no need to talk about hunting them. But now it’s too late, and something needs to be done, since the wild cats are having a negative effect on the environment.

This leads me to what I really hate about cats. Not all cats.. some people do keep their cats indoors. But too many cat owners allow their cats to run wild through the neighborhood. I read about public ordinances where dog owners have to pickup after their dogs (which I do, and think is the right thing to do when walking my dog.. I take baggies and pick up after her) but people seem to think that allowing their cats to enter other’s yards and crap is just fine… usually they love to add “well they bury it.”

Anyone that owns a dog who’s ever found a kittie cookie in the yard, and rolled in it.. knows that it being buried doesn’t mean shit. If your dog rolls in it, they’re gonna smell so bad as to make you gag. Thanks selfish cat owner. There have been plenty of times where a cat has gone in my yard and it’s been bad enough for me to smell as well.

Maybe we can get an ordinance passed here too, where if you cat comes onto my property… time for target practice. Nail ’em with some kind of tracking dot so I can follow them to their home and leave their shit on their owner’s porch. Or drag the owner over to clean up after their little ball of fur. We’ll see how they like it then.

Testing from phone… If you March 17, 2005 at 6:57 pm

Testing from phone…
If you can see this, then I successfully setup hblogger which allows me to blog directly from my new treo 650 phone. Damn but technology is cool.

Tried putting up a shot of the dog from the phone’s ca. too.

hmm… so need to work on pics

-Mike

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

Well that was fun… NOT! January 9, 2005 at 1:42 am

So, after a 300 day uptime, I figured it was time to upgrade my server to the 2.6 kernel tree. Simple build, simple reboot… I thought. Turns out my motherboard ate it. It wouldn’t boot back up.. just hung after detecting the ide drives.

I tried removing disks, removing every single card (in case there was a bad card effecting the board), no go. Luckily I still had my old gaming box which was very similar (dual athlon) and had an identical case so I was able to move the hdd cages right over and boot up on that hardware for now.

Guess my plans for a new server, opteron based of course 🙂 are being moved up a bit sooner then I had planned.

*Update:* So I’m thinking something with a load-out like so for a nice.. really high-end server that’ll last me awhile. 🙂